The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  On my map, the Reef Group resembled a jellyfish swimming east. Its head was a brainlike cluster of islands with great tentacles dragging behind. Some of those tentacles began as islets, but they all disintegrated into light blue tendrils and streamers, coral reefs that disappeared, appeared, zigzagged through the sea until the longest finally trailed off more than twenty miles west. Nukapu lay on its own, far beyond the last shoal. It was not an easy place to reach. Fortunately, anyone heading for Nukapu was likely to first come to the trading post for fuel. I waited for two days, and they came: three men and a boatload of mosquito nets. They were health workers conducting an antimalaria campaign. But they had also heard of the impending feast on Nukapu, and they liked the idea of free food. They agreed to take me with them if I paid for the gas.

  We left at dawn. The boat was a wide aluminum sled with a forty-horse outboard engine. The lagoon was so broad you could barely see its western fringe. But it was as warm and as calm as a bathtub. Sometimes the water was so flat and so clear that skimming across it felt like flying above a surreal blue desert. It glowed like the sky. Sometimes the coral colonies rose beneath us like giant muffins, clouds, or castles, with parrotfish swirling around their ramparts like flocks of birds. Sometimes the lagoon showed the curve of the earth. Passing islands did not retreat into the distance but sank beneath the ice-smooth horizon. Sometimes I saw people walking on that liquid horizon, casting nets far from any canoe or island like so many fisher messiahs. But when we approached, we found them ankle-deep, teetering on the fringes of barely submerged mesas of coral. Sometimes the water was so shallow we had to cock the engine, climb out of the boat, and push, and then the reef was a miniature forest of grasping fingers, white twigs, and brainlike stones. Orange anemones moved like animated shag carpet. The coral sliced into my ankles, and a flurry of tiny fish the color of Bunsen burner flames rose to chase the trail of my blood.

  We approached the northern lip of the lagoon and cut the engine again. The men used an oar to push through what looked like a field of sunken caribou antlers. Then the lagoon floor was cleaved open by a deep crevasse. We followed it as it widened into a canyon and then a valley, and finally a deep blue infinity. The sun and the stillness of the day had pressed the southeast swell into a benign, undulated smoothness.

  We passed Pileni, where Henry Montgomery had landed with Forrest. A single cloud hung above it like a white umbrella. A few miles beyond Pileni was what appeared to be the last island in the world, a lonely white dune, bare except for a low fin of scrub and oak. The swell curled into long arcs around its reef. We skirted the reef, and I scanned the island for signs of life.

  “Nobody stap long disfala aelan,” said one of the mosquito men. What a thought. A desert island. I realized that I had not spent a night alone in four months.

  We switched fuel tanks and continued northwest. By midday the horizon had been wiped clean of everything except Tinakula, which we could see if we stood up. The journey began to feel like a descent into a dream. The world was delicate and ethereal. It lost its solidity. We rode up gentle blue hills and down again.

  These were our way marks:

  A sunbathing turtle.

  A leaping porpoise.

  A flock of black gulls.

  A single cloud grew in the sky to our west. We aimed for it. After an hour, palms rose out of the swell. Nukapu.

  It looked just as it should, like the lithograph I had seen in the Melanesian Mission’s annual report for 1878. Like a scrap of shag carpet. Like Gilligan’s Island.

  It was eerily familiar: There was the reef, which we poled across, and the lagoon. There was the sandy shore. There were the thatch huts, and there was the smoke that had twisted up from cooking fires for a millennium. There, on a raised terrace, was Bishop Patteson’s iron cross, painted white and decorated with palm fronds. Behind the cross, presumably on the site where the bishop was killed, stood a rickety church. With its palm-thatch eaves, the church resembled the pool bar at a Club Med. I felt as though I was still floating, as though the magic was waiting for its moment.

  We were led to the chief’s house, an immaculate, split-level thatch hut. The ground level was lined with grass mats. On stilts, at waist height, was a sleeping room. The chief was away. A man who claimed to be the chief, but who was really only the assistant chief, came to introduce himself. Silas Loa was his name. He had thick jowls and tiny eyes. “You are on Nukapu now,” he said, puffing his chest up under his floral shirt. “You will pray tonight. You will bow down before the bishop’s cross before you enter church.”

  “Yes, of course we will,” I said.

  “Watch out for him,” one of my friends whispered when Silas turned his back.

  The village grew crowded. People arrived in dugout canoes and fiberglass long boats. There were church choirs in matching T-shirts and swaggering bêche-de-mer traders.

  At dusk there was a memorial service. A choir from Pileni sang in exquisite harmony. People wore their best T-shirts. Some wore shoes. One boy had sneakers with LEDs imbedded in the soles. They flashed when he walked. The minister, who had come in a canoe from Nendo, retold the story of Patteson’s death. “This is why you and I are Christians now,” he said in Solomons pidgin. “Because someone laid down his life for us.”

  Later, as the half-moon crept up through the palms, we carried oil lamps to the clearing beneath the bishop’s cross. The children performed a pageant. A dreadlocked altar boy starred as Patteson. The old folks gathered around me and whispered their versions of the bishop’s death. The murderer was a Nukapu chief, insisted one codger. No, the murderer was from Matema, hissed his wife. And so on. Nobody could imagine why a palm frond with five knots had been placed on the bishop’s corpse.

  “What about Mr. Forrest?” I asked.

  Nobody had ever heard of a Mr. Forrest.

  What people agreed on was Patteson’s supernatural legacy. The ocean floor where the bishop’s body had lain for decades was moving, heaving, pushing the bishop’s bones toward the surface. “The bishop wanted us to remember where he was buried, so he made a reef,” said Silas solemnly. “We call it Patteson Shallows,” said an old woman.

  Then there was the site of the bishop’s murder. It had been rising every year, too. It was the highest spot on the island. The iron cross that stood on that mound was the nexus of the bishop’s power.

  “Once a missionary told us that we did not need to go to the hospital if we were sick. We just need to go to Bishop Patteson’s cross,” said a man.

  “The old, the sick, we just take them there—”

  “For example,” interrupted Silas, “one catechist had ten or twelve kids, and they were all dying, all in the space of a few weeks.”

  “Malaria?” I asked.

  “No. A kastom sickness, which came because he had been fighting over land. When the man had only one son left, he took the boy and pushed him underneath the cross. He said, ‘All my pikinini are dead, please, bishop, let me keep just this one. If my boy lives, he will work for God.’ That boy was saved! Now he is a catechist in the church.”

  The bishop’s ghost was being treated much like Melanesians had always treated their ancestor spirits. He was, indeed, becoming stronger in his death. His cross oozed mana. Why not? The bishop of Malaita, who had railed against the mana-ization of Christian symbols, would not have approved, but it didn’t seem like such a bad thing for Patteson’s ghost to exert a benevolent influence. Especially if it worked.

  Silas moved closer. “You understand it was God’s plan for the bishop to die here, not ours.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you see that we have helped you,” he said. “So now you must help us. We want to find Bishop Patteson’s family. His grandsons.”

  “Tell them we are Christian,” pleaded the old lady. “Tell them we know the Master now.”

  “We want to build a special house for the cross,” said Silas. “And we want to put a computer in it, so we can be on the Internet.”
/>   “For tourists,” added someone else.

  “But you would need electricity for a computer,” I said, “and a telephone line…”

  Silas was not listening. He leaned in toward me and lowered his voice. “And you should help me, too. The bêche-de-mer man has a crate of beer in his canoe. You should buy me some beer.”

  Beer was rare on the outer islands. When men got their hands on it, they drank as much as they could as fast as they could. To buy a crate of beer would be to catalyze an evening of chaos and tears. And besides, I didn’t like Silas. I didn’t like his bulging, suspicious eyes, or the way he took care to stand slightly higher than everyone else, or the way he pushed his face into mine.

  I assured the people I would try to help them, and then I retreated to the real chief’s house. Silas followed me. I felt his hand on my shoulder just as I was about to duck inside.

  “Did you know that sometimes a column of light shoots up into the sky from the bishop’s cross?”

  “I’d like to see that,” I said, pulling away.

  “Of course it takes weeks of prayer to bring the light.” Silas tightened his grip on my shoulder. His breath was heavy with betel.

  I waited.

  “A storm is coming. You are in danger,” he said. “But I can help you in your journey. I can keep you safe. I am very powerful, because the bishop, the patron saint of Nukapu, gave me his power.”

  I did not want to hear this. It was not the end I wanted for my story.

  “Bishop Patteson came to me in a dream once. He told me not to be afraid. He told me he would take special care of me. There was light shining from his face. Ever since, I have been able to use his power.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You heal people.”

  “More than that.” Silas stepped between me and the door of my hut. “Suppose I get in a fight with some man. Maybe he has hurt me or done something bad. I always warn him first: I tell him watch out, now something bad will happen to you. And then in a day or two, he will fall down, or cut himself, or get bitten by a shark. That’s the power the bishop gave me.”

  “That doesn’t sound very Christian to me.”

  “Ha! Don’t you worry. You have promised to help us. So tomorrow I will pray under the cross for the bishop to protect you. Then, sometime—I can’t promise you when—he will come to you in a dream. He will make you safe. He will bring you success.”

  “Thank you,” I said, straining to free my shoulder from his grip.

  “But remember your promise. You must find the bishop’s grandchildren. You must tell them to send money. If you do not do that, something very bad will happen to you.”

  He squeezed harder. “Something very, very bad. Maybe you drown.”

  The three-quarter moon had climbed to its apex. It cast the village in silver light. Our shadows were sharp and black beneath us. Silas’s eyes glistened. I despised him for what he was doing to Patteson’s myth. A century after their conversion, the Nukapuans were now converting Christianity: Patteson had not banished the tindalo, the powerful ancestor spirits. He had become one. And here was Silas, threatening me with an invocation of the martyr’s ghost. Patteson would surely be rolling in his saltwater grave. I crept inside and waited until the sound of Silas’s footsteps faded away. One of my friends stirred on the floor.

  “Don’t worry, Charles,” he whispered. “That man is a liar.”

  I knew it. All the night’s talk rang false. Nukapu was not what it should have been.

  The feast day was searingly hot. I tried to avoid Silas, but he was everywhere. There he was, announcing the Pileni Youth for Christ dance group (they wore grass skirts, waved their arms like the dancers at the Waikiki Hilton, and sang, “We are dancing in the light of God”); there he was, apportioning the feast (parcels of leaf-wrapped pork and sweet potato, baked in an earthen oven, they resembled the remains of Christmas presents after a house fire); there he was ordering people to sit down at their banana-leaf place mats and eat. Silas was always barking at people. And he always seemed to be watching me with one eye. He insisted I make a speech, so I stood up and told the people that Nukapu was “wan gudfala Christian paradaes.”

  But when I saw the bêche-de-mer trader loading his boat, I collected my things and threw them in.

  As I said my hurried good-byes, an old lady, who turned out to be Silas’s grandmother, pulled me aside. The sun-baked skin on her face and arms was covered in tattoos. There were fish bones and stars, and on one arm, a name: Steven. Her earlobes had been stretched into long, flabby rings. She pulled the pipe from her mouth and hissed at me in her own language.

  “She is telling you to remember that we are not heathens anymore,” said the girl beside her. “There are no heathens left on the island. We are Christians. You must not be scared. We won’t kill anymore white men.”

  The woman thrust a woven handbag into my arms and peered at me imploringly.

  “I’m not scared,” I said. “That’s not why I’m leaving.”

  The trader pushed his boat free of the sand. I waded into the sea behind him. Silas charged into the water behind me.

  “My friend. You won’t break your promise, will you?” he said. “Because if you do…Ha! Ha!”

  He slapped me on the back. I scowled at him and hopped into the boat.

  “Mi funi nomo!”—I was only joking!—Silas shouted over the roar of the outboard as we pulled away. But he wasn’t smiling.

  I turned to the sea and did not look back. I wasn’t scared. I was angry, breathless with disappointment, but also on the verge of understanding. I didn’t need another word from Silas. I wanted to be alone.

  I asked the bêche-de-mer trader to drop me on the deserted island I had seen near Pileni. All the boats returning from Nukapu would pass near it when the feasting was over in a day or so. I could just flag down one of those boats, I said, imagining it would be like hailing a cab. It was a foolish idea. The trader agreed to drop me only because he knew the island was not actually deserted.

  To my dismay, a fisherman and his family were standing on the beach when we crossed the reef. They had paddled over from Pileni in dugout canoes. They had brought water jugs, cassava, babies, a portable stereo, and a shoe box full of gospel cassettes. They had built huts from sticks, palm leaves, and plastic bags. Now the music was blaring, the babies were bawling, and the white sand had been transformed into a minefield of buried shit. The men were tired. They had spent ten nights diving in the lagoon for bêche-de-mer. The slugs were now shriveling on racks above a fire tended by the fisherman’s wife. Their insides oozed out like pus.

  The fisherman offered me a shell full of turtle soup. I ate with him in the shade, but then I told him I wanted to be alone. This made him sad, but still he ordered his two sons to carry my backpack away from their camp, through the young palms and oaks to the south end of the island, which he called Makalom.

  The island was a temporary place, a perfect teardrop of sand that would surely disappear with the next big cyclone. A strong man could throw a coconut across its widest point. I had brought a tent. I pitched it where I could see the surf breaking on the reef, the smoke curling from Tinakula, and the palms of Pileni trembling like a clump of dandelions on the southern horizon. If I climbed a tree, I could probably see Nukapu, too. But I didn’t do that, and I tried not to imagine Silas, who would surely still be licking the pig fat from his fingers and bragging about the special magic he had inherited from the martyred bishop.

  I watched the family from my tent as daylight bled from the sky. After dark, the fisherman and his sons pushed their canoes out from the beach and drifted silently across the lagoon. They slid into the water, shattering the reflection of the moon. Their flashlights glinted, glimmered, and faded with each dive, illuminating the surface of the water from below. The surf burned white on the edge of the reef beyond them like a phosphorescent brush fire sweeping back and forth across a dark plain. Thunderheads boiled silver in the distance. Tentacles of vapor were reaching nor
th across the sky. A storm was approaching.

  I waited hours for the men to paddle back to their camp. When they did, I listened for their murmurs to cease, for the last gospel song to finish, for the babies to stop crying. Through the trees, I watched their fire spark and flicker and finally settle into an untended glow. I knew the fisherman and his family said their prayers. They thanked God, and probably their ancestors, too, implored them to bring more slugs and to keep the storms at bay for just another week.

  Now, for the first time in four months, I was alone, facing the sea. A breeze sent shivers across the lagoon.

  From the moment I had spotted Makalom, I had imagined ending my story there. I had imagined myself alone, knee-deep in the lagoon, understanding the weight and truth about stories and gods and ancestors. But it would not work. The story could not end with Silas’s threats still rippling across the water. It was not the concept of the dead bishop’s power that troubled me. It was the idea of Silas using Patteson’s spirit like a curse-dispensing kastom stone, the idea that God could be reversed and reduced to a weapon. No. It wouldn’t do.

  The central struggle in Melanesia was no longer the fight between Christian and pagan mythology. The Christian God had pretty much won the battle. Paganism was on its last legs. The old spirits survived only in a few last pockets of resistance, like the wounded remnants of an army at the end of a long siege. Even in the Kwaio hills, Christian soldiers were hammering at the battlements of pagan ritual. But the old way of thinking, the way of mana, had survived and flourished within the Christian churches. The real fight now was the tug-of-war between mana and mysticism; between those who tried to claim and direct supernatural power, like children throwing rocks at their enemies, and those who were certain that the heart of their Christian myth was self-sacrifice and divine love. It was between Old Testament thinking—which was very much in keeping with kastom ideas about mana and which was increasingly popular among Christian evangelicals—and New Testament thinking, which rejected sorcery and magic in favor of a transcendent kind of vulnerability. The Church of Melanesia claimed to have oriented itself unambiguously toward the mysticism of the New Testament. It was a profound distinction. The key to this philosophy was not commandment, reward, or punishment. It was not the directing of thunderbolts toward one’s enemies. It was not the prophet Fred draining the lake on Tanna Island. It was certainly not Silas invoking the spirit of the bishop to draw favors from me or cast bad luck on his neighbors. It was not magic as technology, nor was it a sorcerer’s stone. The key, which you do not have to be Christian to appreciate, was Jesus without his miracles, trudging out of Jerusalem with his cross on his back, toward death and rebirth. It was the shedding of power and worldly wherewithal. It was love. But most of all it was a story whose power came only through faith and its sister, imagination. Silas had gotten it wrong, and so, in my hunger for magic, had I.